


winter lives in my bones

by pendules



Category: Football RPF, Sports RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-25
Updated: 2011-06-25
Packaged: 2017-10-20 17:28:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/215237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendules/pseuds/pendules
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>It's just a man and his mind. He's afraid. He's afraid of being afraid.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	winter lives in my bones

Sheva, at nine, watches kids younger than himself play football. It's strange - he's already obsessed with it by then, but he's not entirely sure why. He's quiet as a kid; he likes to look, observe, figure out how things work. He wonders what you need to play football. A ball, of course. A pitch of some kind. You need bones, muscle, tendons and ligaments. A heart, lungs. Blood. Oxygen. Sheva presses a finger against his shin bone. Thinks, Bones. Old bones. Cold bones.

The world ends with a bang two weeks later.

In London, twenty-one years later, he thinks, Wintry bones.

 

He doesn't have nightmares; it's never that startling, that obvious. Instead, it's something lurking in the corner of every room, just outside his peripheral vision, in the corner of his eye. It's like one of those horror movies that draws itself out, reels you in, and makes the apprehension, the waiting, the uncertainty, the truly terrifying part. Sheva doesn't like horror movies. But that is, of course, always the scariest part. You wait, for a week as a confused child; you wait twenty years wondering if some part of your body isn't your own anymore, if there's something inside you intent on destroying you from the inside. He closes his eyes, opens them. The thing in the corner is gone.

Sheva calls Kakà one Sunday afternoon in his second year here - he asks, "Do you believe in ghosts? Do you believe that right alongside this reality there exist infinite more - every choice we make or do not make contributing to them? Infinite ghosts of what could have been?"

Kakà, he says, "But ghosts - ghosts are remnants, impressions of what used to be. Not what _could_ have been."

"So you _do_ believe in ghosts?"

"I believe that your imagination is delightful and alarming all at the same time." Ricky is grinning, he knows. Ricky is laughing at his Sheva hundreds of miles away in Milan.

Sheva remembers why he loves him, then; it is, for a moment, clarity.

He closes his eyes, opens them.

Sheva sees ghost towns in his head full of people he used to know.

 

Sheva's seeing ghosts, ghosts of the past, ghosts of the future. Ghosts, dust, old bones, disintegration. Old bones, cold bones.

Sheva thinks he can't breathe sometimes. Sheva feels his lungs fill with liquid sometimes. He wants to drain it all out. The liquid, the waste, the dust, the aches (in his bones), the pain. Blood, oxygen, memories, pictures behind his eyes. Eyes: you need eyes to play football. They blur into black-and-white images.

He closes them. Opens.

(He dreams about blank, unseeing eyes. Dead eyes containing no images. Dead eyes. Dead lungs. Dead hearts. Everywhere.)

Sheva feels phantom weights on his chest. Sheva, Sheva thinks his heart stops beating sometimes.

 

Winter sneaks up on him. It's a different kind of cold, not like he's used to. It doesn't bite at his skin, his fingers, at cartilage, like it's supposed to. (There was always something comforting about that: about scarves and gloves, puffs of breath on his ear, Ricky's pink cheeks.) It gets into his bones. It gets inside, uninvited. He catches a cold and hacks up his lungs intermittently. This terrible rattling cough. It's not about age - it's not about bodies and immune systems wearing down - he's sure. He's sure because he has to be. He's sure because that wasn't the reason he left, wasn't supposed to be the reason he left. (Of course, it is. It always was.)

Better let the cold take him. Better fall hard and fast than a slow downward spiral of false hope and inevitability.

They don't ever last very long. He was meant to last even less.

 

(Kakà remembers this summer in Brasil, this summer when he was a kid. It was so hot and dry, the skin peeled off his lips and they cracked like the dusty earth. So hot, you would have fainted, if there wasn't a ball at your feet, if there wasn't somewhere to run to, if there weren't dreams to be had, fantasies behind your eyes moving at lightning speed.)

 

In February, he watches them play Arsenal in white and black. He doesn't think he sees anything but Kakà's face, his dark hair, his gloved fingers. (Everytime he blinks, he sees another memory.) Remembers those fingers coming up to touch his neck; remembers how he'd shut his eyes when he brought Ricky's forehead to his own. Just for a second, but he used to see so much within it: his life, and Ricky's. The entire journey from where they had started to where they were. Together.

His eyes open and it starts again. It starts again at the Emirates. It starts again four years ago in Italy.

(Something he knows too well: Your dreams can last for days, for years, but when you wake up, only a moment has passed.)

 

Sheva somehow gets through the hotel undetected. He stands outside the door he knows leads to Kakà, sends a text — _i left a surprise at your door. open up._ He waits two minutes; then, the door opens a few inches. A single brown eye peers out from under a thick dark eyebrow. He sees him there, presses a finger to his lips, then disappears back into the darkness behind, presumably to check whether his roommate is suitably unconscious. He reappears more quickly this time. Opens the door and comes all the way into the hallway, shutting it noiselessly behind him.

"Duckie," he says, apologetically.

Then, "You shouldn't be here."

Sheva smiles that smile, the one that goes all the way up to crinkle his eyes. As if he could resist that.

"It's weird, now," he says, "having you this close."

And he has to touch, of course he does. Just reaches out and rests his fingertips against his chest, a light but solid pressure. Just feels the warmth of him through his too-thin t-shirt. And that's all he does. It's not the first move; it's just a question.

"Sheva..."

And it's all he needs.

"Quiet."

And he presses him up against the door, one hand already under the fabric and touching his skin, the other splayed across his neck and left cheek. Kakà registers his hands being cold, but that's only for a while. He thinks about him, almost alone in this place, in this city of millions, and pulls him closer, tries to put all his desperate desire to understand him into that kiss.

 

The weather changes gradually, but Sheva's hands never seem to regain their warmth, as if they're being chilled from the inside.

It's a reminder. It's a reminder he wants to keep close. It keeps him from doing anything stupid; keeps him from acting like he's young again. Because he's not. He really is not.

 

But, of course, there is Ricky.

 

Sheva meets him in a coffeeshop after he lands in Milan.

"Things aren't supposed to end well for me. I didn't want to be here - didn't want to be with _you_ \- when that happened."

Kakà looks at him, says, "Nothing ever ends well. Not really."

"I don't want to be alone. When it ends. Or at all."

And that's all Kakà ever needed to hear. It's not about winds blowing in from the north or east. It's not about deteriorating tissues. It's just a man and his mind. He's afraid. He's afraid of being afraid.

He takes Sheva's hand under the table, brushes a thumb across his knuckles.

Sheva closes his eyes, opens them.

And feels the warm touch down to his bones.


End file.
